Show me your papers!

Donald Trump has been crowing loudly that he, Donald The Mighty, has finally forced the President of the United States to make with the long-form birth certificate already. No, the officially-issued document from the State of Hawaii wasn’t good enough; they wanted the doctor’s coffee stains on the thing. Of course it “should have been done earlier” and now The Donald is saying he needs to “verify it for authenticity”.

And Trump inserts himself and says he’s proud of the role he played, and says, “We have to verify this birth certificate. I have to take a look at this.” Historically, it’s quite dastardly, but not uncommon. For most of our history, any white person could grab any black person off the street and demand they dance. Or produce documents. Or kill that person, who wasn’t considered a person.

And Trump says he wants to just walk into the White House and touch this document? That he has the right to do so? You don’t have the right to do shit! You don’t have the right to roll up to the White House and say, “Show me your papers,” like it’s apartheid South Africa! In that, I could hear the voice of random white people in history, demanding money for my vote — wanting to know what’s my business in this part of town.

There are always loonies on the political landscape, George W. Bush had to put up with idiots who thought he somehow engineered 9/11. It would have been pointless for him to deny it, just as it was pointless for Obama to produce the certificate answering a loony charge that he’s some kind of foreign national. But there’s more here than just whackos. The 9/11 truthers never went mainstream. After experts spoke on the subject we only hauled out the Truthers to laugh at them. You didn’t have 40 or 50 percent of a major political party who couldn’t tell you whether Bush had a purposeful hand in 9/11. You didn’t have a major, corporate-funded “news” network pushing the Truthers every day for years. And you never heard serious candidates sniffing that powder.

Birthers, of course, – by and large the same geniuses who can’t tell Nazism from Communism from Socialism from their elbows, or support for religion-neutral government from creeping Sharia conspiracy – deny any racial component to their misgivings about Obama. Presumably every candidate they ever saw caused them to go down a qualifications checklist in their minds, and only actual issues rose to the surface. It wasn’t a matter of whether the candidate was “one of us.”

US Presidents through 44

But I can see their point that they’re not racist. After all, remember the protracted controversy over Nixon’s birth certificate? Or Reagan’s? Or even Hillary Clinton or John Kerrry? Yeah, me neither. For that matter, nobody said boo about McCain and he was supposedly born in the canal zone. I’m sure it’s just coincidence that they went nuts over Obama’s birth.

Just before the release of the so-called “long-form” document, 45 percent of Republicans said they thought Obama was born outside the country and another 22 percent “didn’t know” . Instead of being a one-way trip to obscurity, it actually raised Trump in GOP polls. A prominent Texas state representative actually goes for that stuff, even after the paper is released. And before anyone says that’s “Texas-Bashing”, remember they elected him. Repeatedly.

Now that Obama has released the paper, several highly-placed nuts still aren’t satisfied. And even those who were just playing the issue as long as there were votes to pander to, are now saying Obama somehow engineered the whole thing. Personally? I think he cleverly sneaked into Hawaii in the uterus of a woman who would later be called his “mother”, just so he could be born there and later become President. Some people are just devious that way.

Republicans’ mid-term win was all on the promise of focus on jobs and the economy. Since getting in office, they’ve tried to create jobs and protect the economy by weakening oversight of the financial sector that crashed our economy in the first place, and by working to make sure gays don’t get married, or women get health care, rich person taxed, or anyone educated, or fundamental research done, or any poor person get health care, or public-sector employees have a job environment of professional worth, or any polluters held to account. Some of them are holding hearings and passing laws to prevent “Sharia Law” – a completely nonexistent threat. And of course, they kept the pressure on the President to produce another birth certificate after they didn’t like the official one issued by the State of Hawaii.

Republicans should not be in power until they come to their collective senses and eject the crazy. The party can’t seem to muster the courage to tell the birthers to take a hike. Of course birthers are just a large easily-accessible vote-bloc to them. Since returning to power their agenda (as if there had ever been any doubt about it) is very clear. Like any other addict, until they get into corporate-money addiction rehab they cannot be trusted with the checkbook or the keys to the car.

And yes, I am disappointed that the President released that additional birth certificate for the birthers. Maybe it was a great strategic move, maybe it wasn’t, but to hell with birthers. They’re poison.

Republicans should not be in power until they come to their collective senses and eject the crazy. The party can’t seem to muster the courage to tell the birthers to take a hike.

Which should be a lesson to progressives. The birthers and the Tea Party are willing to take their support elsewhere if the GOP doesn’t give them something they want. Progressives aren’t willing to do that to the Democrats, and politics continues to drift to the right as a result.